★★★★ I’m going to propose an idea: today’s audiovisual is pure recycling. But whereas in the seventies things that were thirty or forty years old were recycled (classic Hollywood), today “recycle” is closer. Merlina is the story of the daughter of the Addams family during her season in high school; it’s a police mystery; she is a coming-of-age and various other things. It is, above all, a funny parody (although not always too funny) and black humor. But Tim Burton (director, not creator) also has poetry, even if he’s not at his best. The soundtrack by Danny Elfman and the (Yes!) recycling of well-known music parodying the pop gesture, the caricature overacting (incidentally quite faithful to the gag-panels of the character’s creator, Charles Addams) and the sarcastic use but finally tender of the clichés (mother-daughter relationship, high school friendships, broken love) give him a grace that shines more in the serial than in the cinema.
